The inaugural service for the Week of Prayer for Christian
Unity in Dublin and Glendalough took place in St George’s and St Thomas’s
Church on Cathal Bruagh Street on Friday January 18.

Archbishop Michael Jackson at the inaugural service for the Week of Prayer for
Christian Unity in St George’s and St Thomas’s Church in Dublin. (Photo: Michael
Debets)

The service was coordinated by the Indian Orthodox
Congregation who use the Church
of Ireland church and was
attended by Church leaders from many Christian denominations including
Archbishop Michael Jackson and Archbishop Diarmuid Martin. Fr Brendan Leahy,
bishop elect of Limerick, was also present.

The preacher by Revd Prof Fredrick Bliss, Professor of
Ecumenical Theology at the University of St Thomas Aquinas, Rome.

In his reflection he said that they were indebted to the
Indian Christian students who cited the great injustices done to the Dalits of
India in their preparation of the background material for this years Week of
Prayer for Christian Unity. They urged congregations to think about the havoc
that castes or religious divisions caused for people, communities and the
Christian Church.

“To live with Christian division is one option. Another is
not to accept the status quo, but to become pro–active disciples of Christ for
the restoration of the unity for which He prayed (John 17, 11),” he said.

Prof Bliss shared a series of stories of people and
communities throughout the world who had chosen to make Christ’s prayer for
unity their own.

Meanwhile, on Sunday January 21 the Roman Catholic
Archbishop of Dublin preached at an ecumenical service to mark the week in St
Saviour’s Church of Ireland Church in Arklow.

In his homily Archbishop Martin said the call to ecumenism
was an urgent call. He added: “There are of course many areas where enormous
progress has been made and if we look at them in terms of the length of years
of our common history of division these gains have been attained in a
remarkably short time.”

Archbishop Martin told the congregation in Arklow that
prayer was the essential stepping stone towards overcoming our “self–generated”
divisions. He later said that a dimension of silence and contemplation must
also form part of our contribution as believers to our world, where so often
the emptiness of noise prevents us from even asking the fundamental questions
about life.

Referring to an address last year by Archbishop Rowan
Williams to the Synod of Catholic Bishops in Rome, he said:
“He(Archbishop Williams) noted that if we do not manage to live more humanly in
this sense we “run the risk of trying to sustain faith on the basis of an un–transformed
set of human habits – with the all too familiar result that the Church comes to
look unhappily like so many purely human institutions, anxious, busy,
competitive and controlling”.

Local Church leaders with the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, the Most Revd
Dr Diarmuid Martin and his master of ceremonies, Fr Damien McNeice, in St
Saviour’s Church of Ireland Church in Arklow for an ecumenical service to mark
the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.